Hey, Frank Bruni, Lay Off Our Fathers!

Progressivism has now progressed to the point that it wants to be the pope — and not only of Catholics but of the whole world.First Hillary Clinton declares her job is to change “deep-seated” religious beliefs around the world that interfere with abortion rights.This week, Frank Bruni, fresh from asserting with approval that Mitchell Gold wants to make Christians take homosexuality off their sin list, decides to attack the Catholic Church for committing the primal sin of patriarchy. “Catholicism Undervalues Women.” The pope is always a man!

Likening Pope Francis’s call for equal pay for equal work to a Pringles vendor decrying obesity, Bruni wrote: “But the Church’s refusal to follow some other Christian denominations and ordain women undermines any progress towards equality that it trumpets or tries. Sexism is embedded in its structure, its flow chart. Men but not women get to preside at mass.”

I had two reactions to Frank Bruni, speaking as a Catholic woman. First: Hey, Frank, lay off our fathers! Some of us appreciate men who commit themselves sacrificially to the service of God and God’s people. The collapse of civilized masculinity is one of the unacknowledged crises of our time. Priests are not ministers or rabbis. They are not first and foremost knowledgeable teachers of religion, like clergymen in many other denominations; they are in themselves a sacrament, a making visible of God’s grace in the world, and the source (by the grace of God) of the sacrament of the Eucharist that unites us each Sunday. God did not just send a Holy Spirit to save us; He became a man, who died for our sins. Each Sunday, and in the confessional, the priest stands as an image of Jesus Christ for us.My second reaction: Frank Bruni, please stop insulting the free will of millions of American Catholic women. We were fortunate enough to be born free; we do not need the self-appointed clergy of the Holy Church of Secular Progressivism imposing its morality on us. (Frank would probably be surprised to learn that 37 percent of young Catholic women who attend Mass, and go to confession, support the Church’s teaching fully.)